Universals of Language and Language Classification
Posted on 2011-07-20 03:29:26.jpg)
Universals of Language and Language Classification By YUEN REN CHAO, Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley Before we proceed to describe the families of languages of the world, classified mainly on genetic relationships, we have to consider the question of the universals of language, features...
Foreign language study – II
Posted on 2011-07-18 02:40:34.jpg)
Foreign language study – II By YUEN REN CHAO, Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley The how of foreign language study Coming now to some practical details of foreign language study, it is of prime importance for the teacher and student to realize that, since language is a set of habits,...
Foreign language study - I
Posted on 2011-07-15 09:55:07
Foreign language study - I The why of foreign language study By YUEN REN CHAO, Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley There are various reasons for which one has to or wishes to study a foreign language. In the first place, it is more profitable, and sometimes necessary, to learn the language...
Translation and style: a brief introduction
Posted on 2011-07-14 04:13:50.jpg)
Translation and style: a brief introduction By Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK Roman Jakobson, writing in 1959 in his famous paper ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, maintains that where the style of a text is particularly important, translation in the strict sense must give way to ‘creative transposition’ (2000: 239)....
Images of English – II
Posted on 2011-07-13 01:57:42.jpg)
Images of English – II By Tore Janson For these reasons English remains strong in most of these countries. In many of them, including gigantic India, English actually has a stronger foothold now than it had at independence. The general level of education is higher now and national and international contacts across linguistic boundaries have become...
Images of English - I
Posted on 2011-07-11 04:28:58.jpg)
Images of English By Tore Janson As the prominent position of English is caused by the three factors mentioned, the attitudes to English among people outside the English-speaking countries may vary accordingly. English may be seen as a language for communication all over the world, or as a tool for the imperialist ambitions of the United States, or...
The Time of English
Posted on 2011-07-08 10:56:42
The Time of English By Tore Janson From the sixteenth century onwards, a few languages of Europe have gradually become the most important ones for communications between language groups, as conquests, business, and colonization promoted them in large parts of the world. Britain turned out to be the most successful imperial power. At the beginning of...
French, German, Russian, English
Posted on 2011-07-06 05:42:16
French, German, Russian, English By Tore Janson French secured a position as an international language in the seventeenth century, as has been mentioned above. This had much to do with the cultural and political strength of France, especially during the long reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715). France remained very influential throughout the eighteenth...
The Heyday of English
Posted on 2011-07-02 11:50:26
The Heyday of English By Tore Janson The New Internationalism A traveller in Europe 100 years ago could expect to find people speaking a foreign language only in international hotels and tourist resorts and among a quite small group of well-educated people. The foreign language they might be acquainted with varied from country to country. In Central...
Translation Examples
Posted on 2011-06-30 11:09:00
Translation Examples Table 1 presents some French-English translation examples taken from out-ofdomain sentences in the test set of the NAACL 2006 WMT shared task. These examples show the effect of semisupervised learning for model adaptation to a novel domain. Table 2 presents some Chinese-English translation examples of the baseline and the semisupervised...
The Disappearance of Languages - Good or Bad?
Posted on 2011-06-30 10:21:40
The Disappearance of Languages - Good or Bad? By Tore Janson When young Wayeyi are asked what languages they use they say that they mostly use Setswana, and sometimes English, but almost never Shiyeyi. But if one asks them what they think about the Shiyeyi language it turns out that they think very highly of it and that they consider it important that...
The Languages Without a Future and Realignment of Dialects
Posted on 2011-06-28 11:49:08
The Languages Without a Future and Realignment of Dialects By Tore Janson Five to seven thousand languages are spoken on earth at present, but most are used only by a small number of speakers.There are now around 6 billion people. The sixty largest languages, in terms of numbers of speakers, share more than 4 billion speakers among themselves. That...
